Apparently Trump’s feelings were hurt after the North Koreans said mean things! The Washington Post: President Trump on Thursday canceled a planned summit next month with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, citing “tremendous anger and open hostility” from the rogue nation in a letter explaining his abrupt decision. “I feel it is inappropriate, at […]

Our panopticon is on track: Powered by artificial intelligence, Rekognition can identify, track, and analyze people in real time and recognize up to 100 people in a single image. It can quickly scan information it collects against databases featuring tens of millions of faces, according to Amazon. Amazon is marketing Rekognition for government surveillance. […]

I just got a call from Katiebird. She lives in a suburb of Kansas City, Kansas. Here’s her rundown:

There were about 1430 people at her caucus site. The large auditorium/gym room in the pictures she sent me showed a standing room only crowd. There were additional people in the hallways.

When they asked people to separate by candidate, they had the Bernie contingent filter out onto a field. The line seemed to go on forever. She said that they were asked to line up in lines of 10 and then they counted. By the time they got to her, there were 300 for Bernie but the counting went on a lot longer after her. They counted the votes three times.

Bernie won her senate district. The exact count was something like 900+ for Bernie, 400+ for Hillary.

She said the Bernie campaign staff were very well organized and efficient. They were prepared for a large turnout. It was a really pleasant experience in contrast to the caucus she went to in 2008 on a Tuesday night in a blizzard when busloads of rowdy Obama supporters, some of whom she was pretty sure were bussed in from another state, crowded the small space they had reserved for the caucus. In that year, Hillary was crushed in her district caucus. She thinks having it on a nice Saturday afternoon when there could be a good turnout and everyone was relaxed made a lot of the difference.

Her sister lives about 30 miles away and they think that Bernie is taking the larger population areas but don’t know if farmers are also receptive to the Bern.

She also said Governor Brownback seems to be facing a serious Democratic challenger. That could be fun to watch this year.

Katiebird is on her way home now ready to unscrew a new fine boxed merlot.

I absolutely agree that caucuses don’t represent the voters of any state. And I think they should be outlawed. My caucus had 1499 people checked in. But by the time the votes were talled we only had 1432. Many people wondered why they couldn’t just vote and leave. Ha. It would be too easy to vote, I guess.

We were supposed to have presidential primaries here but after a budget shortfall the governor and legislature cancelled them.

I wonder what would happen if a major nomination-seeker were to make a point ahead of time of boycotting the caucus states and only running in the primary states . . . . and then doing exactly that. Would it bring pressure on some caucus states to shift to primaries?

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Body: Last week I went down to Washington, D.C. to deliver a paper at a conference in the technical field where I worked, ten years or so and two or three careers ago, before the dot.com trash. The trip was solely an exercise in merit-making, since I doubt very much I'll get work in the field, but reconnecting with old friends was really great -- even […]

The Hill, "Court orders Iran to pay billions to 9/11 victims and families: A federal judge on Tuesday ordered Iran to pay billions of dollars in damages to the families of victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks." It's unlikely they will actually pay it, but the very idea that Iran should have to pay for an attack by Saudi Arabians is pr […]